Add guide to publish to the Official MCP Registry

[joelverhagen]

Summary

Progress on #50105.

Open questions:

1. Do we need more description of "value added"? I.e. why follow this guide? What uses the Official MCP Registry? This will be more clear when GitHub MCP Registry is pulling from it.
2. Do we need to mention remote MCP Servers? Those could be built in .NET or any other language. I only see this code sample as a potential pre-req. Nothing in the dotnet docs area.

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Internal previews

📄 File	🔗 Preview link
docs/ai/quickstarts/publish-mcp-registry.md	docs/ai/quickstarts/publish-mcp-registry
docs/ai/toc.yml	docs/ai/toc

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR adds a comprehensive quickstart guide for publishing .NET MCP Servers to the Official MCP Registry, addressing issue #50105. The guide walks developers through creating a server.json manifest, updating their NuGet package README with the required mcp-name comment, and using the MCP Publisher tool to complete the registration.

Key Changes:

• Adds complete publishing workflow covering manifest creation, package verification, and registry submission.
• Includes platform-specific instructions for Windows, Linux, and macOS using zone pivots.
• Provides a reusable server.json template with placeholder guidance.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 13 comments.

File	Description
docs/ai/quickstarts/publish-mcp-registry.md	New quickstart guide with step-by-step instructions for publishing MCP servers to the registry, including prerequisites, manifest creation, README updates, package publishing, and using the MCP Publisher tool
docs/ai/quickstarts/snippets/mcp-registry/server.json	JSON template file demonstrating the required server.json manifest structure with placeholders for NuGet-based MCP servers

[donnie-msft]

why follow this guide? What uses the Official MCP Registry?

I would say we're showing pipeline maintainers what the best practices are with the guide here. I used your scripts and guidance to setup NuGet Copilot's release pipeline and found it very helpful.

One thing I'm still not clear on is how I want to handle the Stage environment. Should we setup deployments first to Stage, then Prod? Should it be completely ignored? This is something we can mention in the doc once we have a clear understanding ourselves.

[IEvangelist]

This LGTM, the main question I have is - are there plans to add a GitHub action workflow that could be used as a template or something?

[joelverhagen]

This LGTM, the main question I have is - are there plans to add a GitHub action workflow that could be used as a template or something?

That's a good idea, @IEvangelist. I had this quickstart being pretty generic since some folks might want to do it interactively the first time or may be using a different CI/CD system. What would be the best place to put that template? That's the best place to contribute a code sample and accompany it with some docs?

[joelverhagen]

This LGTM, the main question I have is - are there plans to add a GitHub action workflow that could be used as a template or something?

That's a good idea, @IEvangelist. I had this quickstart being pretty generic since some folks might want to do it interactively the first time or may be using a different CI/CD system. What would be the best place to put that template? That's the best place to contribute a code sample and accompany it with some docs?

I will follow up offline on this.